In January 2016 I wrote a blog about how RAIN RFID companies should defend their interests especially in Europe. Frequency regulation moves forward slowly, and now 2,5 years later it gives me great pleasure to conclude that the results so far are rather impressive. Let’s have a look at how the upper ETSI band potentially changes the way tagging is optimized. Surely the change is not immediate, and my story further highlights two factors that currently prevent end users from benefiting from this new regulation.

The October 11th 2018 was a day of small celebration in the RFID industry. Celebration, because on that date, the European Commission published their positive implementing decision about the 915-921 MHz frequency band in Europe. Small, because it came out as somewhat of a compromise in the end allowing less than anticipated new channels, and in coexistence with other IoT and short range devices. What happens then?

Movies have an escapist quality that allows us to explore places, lives and times that are not our own. People in the entertainment film industry embrace new technologies and push them forward to achieve new ways of creating effects and ways to think about technology. Unfortunately, in many instances, the devil is in the details which the directors conveniently omit or forget. On the other hand, their objective is not to make a documentary after all and offending a minor (albeit informed!) crowd is a calculated risk. To this crowd, and the general public, the latest Mission Impossible movie offered a glimpse into RFID.

Roughly 1,000 attendees headed to Phoenix Arizona this year for the GS1 Connect conference. The JW Marriot Desert Ridge provided a convenient and relaxed environment where retailers, suppliers and solution providers mingled for three days. I attended a number of sessions on the conference program and here are my highlights from select speakers.

Increasing acceptance of RFID and the double-digit growth rate of inlay/tag volumes in the past years have made smart labels an attractive business segment not only for the established RFID companies, but also for the traditional label manufacturers. The barrier for a label company to enter the RFID/smart label business is very low as their core business comprises of printing and converting anyways – adding “inlay insertion” or “inlay lamination” to the converting process will increase the label manufacturer’s value-add and enables meeting the customers’ RFID and IoT requirements.

Why not make your labels smart? Read more to find out why you should!

I have been going to the biggest RFID shows for 12 years now. In 2007, it was RFID World in Grapevine, TX. And for the last ten years, it has been RFID Journal Live!. Once again, I flew to Orlando to find out what is new and exciting in RFID. And I have to conclude that not much. Which is pretty much what I also said last year. But - there was something new after all.

Smart labels are basically really simple RF devices and look identical to each other. However, smart label deliveries are highly customized especially in high value specialty label segment. This sets two conflicting requirements for production machinery: high capacity and high flexibility. To address this dilemma, Voyantic has spent more than two years developing a new breed of smart label personalization solutions.

Both RAIN RFID and NFC have been focusing on their own applications and they don’t seem to have much in common. However, the two technologies have a common goal: they strive to be means for connecting items to the cloud. And the technologies don’t really compete against each other. So, it makes perfect sense that the two industries started to pull into one direction. That is why the RAIN RFID Alliance, the NFC Forum and AIM Global joined forces to arrange the first Connections Summit at the Google campus in Sunnyvale, California.

Following research activities of RFID is a nice way to keep up with the latest technology developments. Awareness of hot research topics also helps in anticipating the direction of commercial development and new product launches. Here is my take on the published RFID research in 2017. I have included short comments on the research topics, and a number of links to papers published in 2017 that have caught my attention – for one reason or another.